Off for another long weekend of music and misbehaving on the island. We drove to Belize City where we caught a puddle jumper out to San Pedro along with Amanda. There is where we met up with Ron & Rhonda and a few other friends. After grabbing our golf cart, the first stop was to drop off some meats and see our friends Ed & Runi at the French Croissant Bakery. Then it was on to grab some tacos and a cold beer for lunch at Caliente. By then it was time for us to check into our condo and head over to Castaways to catch Jim Dalton and Amigos for the first evening of great music.

This year they were playing at Castaways, it’s a great new venue up by the Truck Stop right on the beach. The permanent stage at Castaways is in the shape of a giant pirate ship, which is pretty cool. If you’ve been to San Pedro and can’t quite place where it is, it use to be the old Ak-Bol Yoga Retreat north of the bridge.

Yes, that’s Jim Dalton in the middle, bare foot, no cowboy hat, jeans or boots. That night they were all in white for Jim’s whiteout show. For the other shows they were all in the island spirit, sporting shorts and very colorful tropical shirts.

Every year Jim has played in Belize he has had a whiteout party where he request that one night everyone wear something white. I think this is because of about five years ago when he was suppose to do his first show in Belize he got snowed-in in Colorado and couldn’t make it down here.

This was the third time that Jim Dalton & Nick Scropos of (RCPM) and The Jons had been to San Pedro to put on some shows. This year Aaron Beavers of Shurman also came along to join in on the fun. We attended the Friday and Saturday night shows and had a blast.

Their last day was The Boracho Sunday show in the afternoon with a beach barbeque after the sun went down. The staff hauled the BBQ grill down to the beach and went to work cooking up a bunch of beef, fish and lobsters along with all the fixins for some great tacos. We had a great time on the island with all our friends and we can’t wait till they come back next year. Hope to see more of our friends from the states make it down next year for some of these fun times on the island.

One morning in San Pedro we were looking off our balcony and there in the lagoon below us was a nice big crocodile just casually swimming away from the bushes. I’m glad that our room was on the second floor, because the first floor patio was only twenty feet or so from the bushes.

Then later that day, before the show, we decided to take a dip in the pool to cool off. There on the pool deck a few feet from us was a big bright green iguana eating a plant. There are a lot more iguanas in San Pedro than up by our place. I’ll bet you would have no problem seeing a hundred a day if you just looked around.

It’s great to get away for a few days, but we have a lot to do and maintain daily up at our place in the jungle. This year we had a great crop of pineapples and we have been eating them just about every day for breakfast since early June. There are still a few more on the plants, but for the most part they are finishing up. Now that they are winding down, breakfast will be dragon fruit and raspberries for the next couple of months. Currently there are no bananas on plants, but I assume they will all bloom at the same time and in a few months we will have more than we ever need. During the week, we usually just eat fruit for breakfast, but come the weekend we will break out some bacon or sausage and eggs. We get the fresh eggs from our neighbor and we actually know people who make great bacon and sausage.

Since pineapple plants only produce one pineapple per plant, it’s time to get more in the ground for next year. You can take the top of a pineapple and plant it and it will take a couple of years to produce a fruit. Or once the plant produces a pineapple, on the bottom of the pineapple there is usually 1-4 other shoots that start growing called slips. If you plant these they will usually produce a pineapple the next year. We have been planting the tops and the slips to sort of offset everything. Between our place and the farm lot we’ve got around 300 plants growing, in which maybe half should produce next year.

Ruben is still harvesting tomatoes and we finally had some time to get a bunch for us. So once we got back from the island he brought us down a couple hundred nice big Roma tomatoes. Kelley will get them canned and that should last us until the next planting’s harvest. Currently, he already has at least another thousand tomato seedlings going. They should go in the ground in a week or two and start producing in a couple of months.

Anything electronic just doesn’t last too long in this environment. After six year the winch on the truck decided that it was just going to give up. I’m good at fixing things and I tried just about everything I could think of to revive it. New cables, new relay, different battery and even pulling the whole thing apart and cleaning the brushes. It was time we had to give up and get a new one. We managed to get a killer deal on Amazon Prime day, so that worked out great.

For anyone thinking about visiting us down here in Belize and think it’s too far away, it’s really not. A lot of direct flights to Belize come out of Dallas or Houston, there are a few direct flights from other cities, it just depends on what airline and the time of year. From Dallas or Houston it’s just a little over two hour flight time till you land in Belize. From there it is only a 1hr and 45min drive to our place. Currently, the major airlines that fly here are Southwest, Delta, American, Alaska and United. If you shop around, watch the sales and are flexible on your flight days, you should be able to get a good deal on some flights. This past week Southwest had some one way flights from Phoenix to Belize in November for under $200, and you can’t beat that.

After staying up in the jungle and exploring things around our place, you might want to head over to check out some Caribbean beaches. From our place it’s a 1hr and 45min drive back to the airport where you can catch a 15minute flight on a hopper plane out to San Pedro. San Pedro offers the most in the way of shopping, water activities, food and bar choices, but it’s a bit crowded. Or if you prefer you could drive about 2 and a half hours from our place down to the quite little village of Hopkins. Hopkins still has choices for different water sports and some great restaurants, just not as many as San Pedro, as it’s a quiet village where you can just chill. Or another great choice is a 3 hour drive from our place down to Placencia. Placencia offers a lot more than Hopkins, but not nearly as crowed as San Pedro. All three of these destinations have beautiful beaches with things to do and great food and drinks, it just depends on what you want to do with your time here.

Or if you want something a little more special, there are a lot of private islands where you can spend a few days just getting away from it all. Belize is a beautiful country with so much to offer and it really is a lot closer and less expensive than other Caribbean destinations.